7 Open-Source Serverless Frameworks Providing Functions as a Service

With virtualization, organizations began to realize greater utilization from physical hardware. That trend continued with the cloud, as organizations began to get their virtual machines in a pay-as-you-go service. Cloud computing further evolved when Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched its Lambda service in 2014, introducing a new paradigm for cloud computing that has now become commonly referred to as serverless computing. In the serverless model, organizations pay for functions as a service, without the need to pay for an always-on, stateful virtual machine. While AWS Lambda pioneered serverless computing, there are now multiple open-source projects building serverless frameworks that can be used in multicloud deployments. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at seven open-source serverless frameworks.

IBM started the Apache OpenWhisk project, and it now serves as the basis of IBM’s Cloud Functions service.

The open-source Fission project, led by cloud services vendor Platform9, is a Kubernetes-based framework for serverless capabilities. “Fission is an open-source project that is designed to be the de facto open-source alternative to Lambda,” Madhura Maskasky, co-founder of Platform9, told eWEEK in a January 2017 interview.

IronFunctions is a functions-as-a-service platform written in the Go programming language. Functions is an open-source serverless computing platform for any cloud: private, public or hybrid.

The open-source Fn project was announced by Oracle in October 2017 as an Apache-licensed serverless effort.

OpenFaaS is an open-source effort that makes use of either Docker or Kubernetes to enable a serverless, functions-as-a-service framework.

The Kubeless open-source serverless framework was developed by software vendor Skippbox, which Bitnami acquired in March 2017. Kubeless is a Kubernetes-native serverless framework that has a command line interface (CLI) that is compliant with the AWS Lambda CLI.

Among the newest open-source serverless frameworks is the Riff project, which is backed by Pivotal and is the basis for the upcoming Pivotal Function Service (PFS).